was besides a symbol of destruction and battle, as well as of
light and fertility. Horus assumed that form in one legend to destroy
Set and his followers.[370] But, of course, the same symbols may not
have conveyed the same ideas to all peoples. As Blake put it:

What to others a trifle appears Fills me full of smiles and
tears.... With my inward Eye, 't is an old Man grey, With my
outward, a Thistle across my way.

Indeed, it is possible that the winged disc meant one thing to an
Assyrian priest, and another thing to a man not gifted with what Blake
called "double vision".

What seems certain, however, is that the archer was as truly solar as
the "wings" or "rays". In Babylonia and Assyria the sun was, among
other things, a destroyer from the earliest times. It is not
surprising, therefore, to find that Ashur, like Merodach, resembled,
in one of his phases, Hercules, or rather his prototype Gilgamesh. One
of Gilgamesh's mythical feats was the slaying of three demon birds.
These may be identical with the birds of prey which Hercules, in
performing his sixth labour, hunted out of Stymphalus.[371] In the
Greek Hipparcho-Ptolemy star list Hercules was the constellation of
the "Kneeler", and in Babylonian-Assyrian astronomy he was (as
Gilgamesh or Merodach) "Sarru", "the king". The astral "Arrow"
(constellation of Sagitta) was pointed against the constellations of
the "Eagle", "Vulture", and "Swan". In Phoenician astronomy the
Vulture was "Zither" (Lyra), a weapon with which Hercules (identified
with Melkarth) slew Linos, the musician. Hercules used a solar arrow,
which he received from Apollo. In various mythologies the arrow is
associated with the sun, the moon, and the atmospheric deities, and is
a symbol of lightning, rain, and fertility, as well as of famine,
disease, war, and death. The green-faced goddess Neith of Libya,
compared by the Greeks to Minerva, carries in one hand two arrows and
a bow.[372] If we knew as little of Athena (Minerva), who was armed
with a lance, a breastplate made of the skin of a goat, a shield, and
helmet, as we do of Ashur, it might be held that she was simply a
goddess of war. The archer in the sun disc of the Assyrian standard
probably represented Ashur as the god of the people--a deity closely
akin to Merodach, with pronounced Tammuz traits, and therefore linking
with other local deities like Ninip, Nergal, and Shamash, and
partaking also like these of the attributes of